abstraction

  1. Noun.  The act of abstracting, separating, or withdrawing, or the state of being withdrawn; withdrawal.
  2. Noun.  (philosophy) The act of leaving out of consideration one or more properties of a complex object so as to attend to others; analysis.
  3. Noun.  An idea or notion of an abstract, or theoretical nature; as, ''to fight for mere '''abstractions'''''.
  4. Noun.  A separation from worldly objects; a recluse life; as, ''a hermit's '''abstraction'''''.
  5. Noun.  Absence or absorption of mind; inattention to present objects.
  6. Noun.  The taking surreptitiously for one's own use part of the property of another; purloining. - "[Modern]".
  7. Noun.  (chemistry) A separation of volatile parts by the act of distillation. - Nicholson.
  8. Noun.  (engineering) Removal of water from a river, lake, or aquifer, typically for industrial or agricultural uses.
  9. Noun.  (computing) Any generalization technique that ignores or hides details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances for the purpose of controlling the intellectual complexity of engineered systems, particularly software systems.
  10. Noun.  (computing) Any intellectual construct produced through the technique of abstraction.

This is an unmodified, but possibly outdated, definition from Wiktionary and used here under the Creative Commons license. Wiktionary is a great resource. If you like it too, please donate to Wikimedia.

This entry was last updated on RefTopia from its source on 3/20/2012.